Cooperation vs. Competition: Not an Either/Or Proposition

Several years ago, I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin struggling to come up with an idea for my dissertation on the effects of competition on intrinsic motivation. Much of my interest in motivation stemmed from my own experiences in athletics and academics. I had long been fascinated why some individuals had tremendous passion for what they did, whereas others did not.

One summer evening, still searching for ideas, I went for a bike ride through Madison's Elver Park to clear my head. As I biked into the park, I saw a couple dozen men playing pick-up basketball. I biked on and saw hundreds of men and women playing co-ed softball. Finally, as I exited the park, I saw several games of youth soccer taking place. I was struck by a simple, but testable hypothesis: individuals enjoy activities where they can simultaneously cooperate with their teammates in competition against another team.

To date, the vast majority of research on competition had pitted it against either non-competitive or cooperative conditions. Judy Harackiewicz (my graduate advisor) and I conducted four years of research at my summer basketball camps (www.johnnytauerbasketball.com). In those studies, we had kids shoot free throws the first day of camp.

To simplify things, let's assume all kids made 6 out of 10 free throws in a pre-test of performance that was measured on the first day of camp. On the second day of camp, we gave kids a goal after assigning them to one of four experimental conditions. Each participant shot 10 free throws, either alone, as part of a team, as part of a competition, or as part of a team competing against another team:

Individual - kids shot alone and tried to meet a goal (e.g., try to make 7 out of 10 free throws)

Pure cooperation - kids shot with a teammate and tried to meet a groupgoal (e.g., try to make a total of 13 out of 20 free throws)

Pure competition - kids tried to make more free throws than an opponent (e.g., the winner was the camper who made more free throws out of 10)

Intergroup (team) competition - a team of two campers tried to make more free throws with a teammate than another team of two campers (e.g., the winner was the team that made more free throws out of 20).

After shooting free throws, campers were informed whether they met their goal or won the competition. Campers then completed a questionnaire that measured their enjoyment of the activity, a commonly used self-report measure of intrinsic motivation.

Across four studies, we found clear and consistent evidence that kids enjoyed shooting free-throws more when they were part of a team in competition against another team (intergroup competition) compared to when they were simply cooperating, competing, or shooting alone. This led us to conclude that both competition and cooperation can provide unique benefits to individuals (and that each may have some drawbacks when experienced alone). Thus, this combination of cooperation and competition provides the best of both worlds to participants, and helps explain why team sports are so popular around the world.

Competition is pervasive in our culture, and can be a double-edged sword. Part of the reason team sports are so appealing in our culture is that they provide individuals the opportunity to compete and cooperate at the same time.

In a subsequent post, we'll examine factors that determine when the millions of children who participate in youth sports derive the intended benefits of intergroup competition and when they do not. In the meantime, I'm curious to read examples when you've seen children benefit or suffer in team sports, as opposed to individual sports, and why.

References

Tauer, J.M., & Harackiewicz, J.M. (2004). The effects of cooperation and competition on intrinsic motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, 849-861.

People have many motives for their actions. Let's remember that we are all conditioned to compete by our economic system. In this system if you don't win the game you die. Every year 44,000 Americans die because they didn't make enough money to afford the health care which is available to those who "won the game."

So competition is instilled in us as a necessity. The fact that some players seemed to enjoy themselves more when they were both competing and cooperating may be reflective of our economic system. They were capable of sharing the responsibility for competition. There is power in numbers, after all, and they may have been looking to "the other one" for comfort and support if they lost the competition. They might also have wanted someone to blame for their failure to win the competition.

Remember that in our competitive economic system the reward ( money ) goes to the winner rather than the loser. There is punishment for the loser. So the natural conclusion is to want to belong to a team so you can mitigate the personal humiliation of losing.

Competition is primal. When we encourage competition we are encouraging people to "be like animals." When we encourage cooperation we encouraging a higher form of mental activity. Competition is lower consciousness and cooperation is higher consciousness.

But when we live in a competitive society which rewards winners and punishes losers, it is only natural that some form of competition will work its way into our consciousness.

Please consider how much better our results would be if we would de-emphasize competition and focus on improved methods of cooperation. Part of our endeavor needs to be personal satisfaction and fulfillment through the cooperative activity.

As Gordon Gekko should have said, "Competition, for lack of a better word, is good. Competition is right, competition works. Competition clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Competition, in all of its forms-- competition for life, for money, for love, knowledge-- has marked the upward surge of mankind."

Competition is not intrinsically good. It is best when it is done in the spirit of finding the most effective solution to a problem that is preventing a universal good from being realized. However, why resort to competition when cooperation can be used instead? Is it because there is not enough motivation by the participants to excel unless they can feel that they can show themselves to be better than some other person or group? If this is the case then the desire for competition seems to be a marker of a moral deficiency rather than a virtue to be rewarded. In human society competition is treated as a natural as desire able trait to be encouraged. Who knows what results we may have if we took the focus off competition and put it on cooperation?

What if we would compete not with other people, but with situations - poverty, diseases, lack of abilities, etc. And then in process formulate relevant positive goals? E..g. make happy, sustainable and always developing World?